


Star Wars: Witchlight, A YA Adventure-Romance

by CharlieGM



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Action/Adventure, Adventure & Romance, Alternate Universe, Angst and Humor, Anxiety, Blood and Violence, F/M, Falling In Love, Female Protagonist, Fluff, Gen, Long Shot, Love, Male Protagonist, Pain, Plot, Romance, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Slow Build, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-13 13:48:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29029692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CharlieGM/pseuds/CharlieGM
Summary: A Star Wars story in a pocket universe. In a time of political upheaval, a boy with no name hurdles to the surface of a backwater world to save an innocent soul. Through a twist of fate, the boy crosses paths with the carefree daughter of a witch, whose compassion for life is a small light in a roiling sea of darkness.
Kudos: 1





	1. Lunacy

_A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..._

# STAR WARS

> **The Republic is no more. After years of corrupting it from within, the JUNTA has seized power in a whirlwind of force.**
> 
> **With the Core no longer safe, the few friends of democracy flee to the outer systems, pursued by the Junta’s merciless sorcerers.**
> 
> **As worlds fall in line, however, loyalties to the new regime waiver. A young man with no name has stolen the secret to his Lady’s power, and falls towards sanctuary on the backwater world of CATAWBA...**

* * *

_Falling.  
Falling.  
falling.  
Spiraling through the heavens.  
The boy with no name saw a moon through the escape pod’s porthole.  
Entering. Leaving. Swinging in and out of view.  
The sixth apprentice of Nerva saw it clearly.  
He clung to that moon. He reached out for it and held it in his hand.  
It would come with him.  
Down to the surface, it would come with him.  
One hand holding all his fear, and the other holding the moon.  
What a thrill. He stole the moon.  
The boy with no name stole the moon._

Six woke with a start. A stab of pain threw him back down. He gasped, and clutched the spot that throbbed.

Arm. Right arm. His torn right arm. He found shards of plastiglass embedded in his skin. Lacerations cut up the length of his forearm. They surrounded a thick object. Glass? Eleven centimeters, felt like. There was too much blood. It made the surface wet and tacky, a discomforting feeling in the dark. Six couldn’t see the full extent of the damage, and honestly didn’t want to see it now.

The palm. Six remembered the palm and squeezed. He found aching tension and stiff joints, but no droid.

The droid was gone.

“Blast it all…” Six muttered. The thing that had marked him as a dead boy in the Junta had gotten up and left. Bridges burned and ladies scorned for nothing.

He was reasonably sure this wasn’t a dream of the Force. Pain supposedly ended when one joined it. Death was kind. His senses were stretched and dulled by the solid mass of angry flesh gnawing at him down his arm. It made the whiplash in his neck and heightened pulse unimportant. Above all, it made him aware that there was life inside his body.

Confused, scared, angry, distant, delirious - but alive.

Six’s eyes adjusted the longer he sat in the dark. He began to notice things in his muted delirium.

The cabin had cracked open when it impacted the surface. Largely, it was still together. The metal had failed to withstand the heat of re-entry, and when tested, the sheets of steel protecting Six and the droid had shorn into rough chunks.

He was surprised the escape pod was still in two or three pieces, and not dozens. As it sat, the pod’s cylindrical shape split down the middle, and canted at an unnatural angle. 

Pebbles and sand had leaked into the pod through fissures. The loamy sediment was pillowing to his sides, as if his body was a rock in the process of being swallowed. He found glass shards among grains. Likely, some of the impact had glassed the material underneath in clumps. Not enough to hurt him this bad.

He was lucky not to have crashed into the water. Drowning was a terrible way to die.

The only thing that could have cut Six to ribbons would have been the porthole. He saw it at the end of the pod - or what was left of it.

The semi-circular panes were mangled. Depressurized, probably. When the steel broke down, the plastiglass housing followed, and two feet of glass was suddenly under pressure from too many angles at once. Six must have put his arm out to protect himself in the last microsecond. Shards as large as his hand littered the seating. Any one of them could’ve severed something more vital than Six’s forearm if fate had had a bigger laugh at his expense.

Needless to say, Six was grateful.

He saw something else through the ruined hole. A faint, but steady light. Six pushed himself up against a warped bit of metal to see it.

Slowly, a moon came to rest in the frame. The moon of his mind’s eye was real. Six remembered dimly - it was Catawba’s moon. The planetary object that gave this backwater world a gravitational tide and crystalized its ability to create life. A grey and silver rock splashed with dark craters, a lodestone in the stars.

To his delirious state, the craters looked like dancing hares. The little bit of levity in that thought gave him the strength to hoist himself up.

Whatever he had or didn’t have was a small concern now. At least, it was noise. It fell to the back of his mind. The mission in his head throttled forward. It knocked the need for medical attention to the side and directed his arms upright, so he could climb out of the wreckage and get away.

The boy with no name, the sixth apprentice of Lady Nerva, was not safe here. He was not safe anywhere. Safety had been taken from him. Such was the lot of traitors. Traitors to the junta suffered for their disloyalty. They were afforded no rest from the just and the righteous, and now, he joined the ranks of them, as ignoble and faceless as living garbage.

He felt a mote of pride in choosing to betray. The decision was made on his terms, not anyone else’s. Rather to be hunted down and killed, than let a living creature suffer unjustly and live. 

Still, Six’s heart begged for him to stop this foolishness. It pleaded in vain to go back. This was too far, too foreign, too unknown. This new world was too displaced from his old routines to find a happy footing. A sense of alarm was creeping up his back. But without the means to return to the flagship Warden, there wasn’t a flicker of hope left in the thought. Just a dull, meaningless pang of regret. The chain that held him to his old life was calling for him to mend the broken links, but Six had neither the tools nor the compassion to make it whole. All of his life was up there. All that it used to be. The separation was permanent.

He felt weakness crawl into his gut like an animal hollowing him out for a home. The boy was afraid it would eat everything inside him, and truly turn him into a husk. The fear was a good enough motivator to keep going.

Six crawled out of the lip of the pod. He felt his tunic cut into the broken glass, but compared to the pain in his right arm, it somehow didn’t matter. He shoved over the top, and fell into sand. A long, guttural groan came from him. The sand stung his wounds. He felt wetness under his elbows.

Six realized that he never felt ocean water before. He looked, and found more ocean than any one being could ever explore in their lifetime.

The pod had crash-landed on a beach. Six staggered upright, and fought the blood rushing to his head so he could take stock of it all. The sand was set in a gentle rise. The tide came up to a point, and past it, there were ferns and permanent vegetation. Past that, the ground sharply came up to a low cliff, and from there, turned into a lawn of wheat before the edge of a forest.

This land was carved low, but once Six got up to the treeline, he would have some kind of a shelter to protect himself. When soldiers came, and Six was sure they would come for him or the droid, then at least the forest would create distance. Give him a head start, he supposed. It delayed the shooting. It gave him time to collect himself and feast on this pain.

The droid had probably wandered into the forest too. Unless it really was stupid enough to travel up the beach, which, Six suspected it wasn’t. All he knew was that if the droid survived, then perhaps he would too. If the droid did not survive, then he was a corpse walking.

He checked his belt. Not much with him. Two rations, a grapnel line and his lightsaber, and that was it.

It would have to do.

Six tested his stride. It was more steady than it was unsteady. Running was too much to ask, but a brisk walk would wake him up. Let the blood circulate - which might mean more bleeding. That was a risk he would have to take - on different terms than the ones given.

He tore off a piece of his pants sleeve. And then, he grit his teeth, gripped the largest piece of glass in his forearm, and pulled it out.

The pain fountained. Six staggered back into the hull of the pod and let out a low, stuttering moan. Better to do it now, then to let it stay exposed, but by the dark, it hurt so bad, he thought he might pass out there with the blood-clumped sand.

But it didn’t take him. The glass had thankfully missed bone, and it was only the meat that needed mending. It pulsed angrily at him, but the wound was tolerable.

He wrapped his forearm tightly in fabric. Red seeped through the black.

Dizziness met with vertigo for a moment and pinned him to the housing of the pod, but only long enough to remind him that he had lost a fair portion of blood. Slowly, feeling came back to him. Six planted his feet and lurched himself to a standing position.

When gravity and balance bore him out, he pointed himself towards the line of trees in the far distance and marched.

Come hell or high tide, Six would survive this. He survived things that would have killed a normal apprentice before. The dark side within him was already nursing on his pain. If called upon, he could use it. Channel the agony of this loss, spiritual and physical, into a weapon that felled his enemies, whoever they turned out to be.

He felt woefully unprepared to do that. 

One part of dark power was the confidence to control it. Transmutation of emotions into fury called for a base solute of restraining strength to hold it all together. It was like bundling many little impulses and casting them in a single direction. Six had none of that strength. Right now, his emotions were raw. The core of his being was frayed. He was unbalanced, scared, ruled by terror and chased by wolves.

The weapon he might draw from this dark power would be a brittle, useless thing. It could kill him outright.

Barring that, Six still had his lightsaber. That was usually enough.

He stopped in the shade of a gnarled tree in the mangrove persuasion and paused to catch his breath.

Somehow, he’d never thought about who could actually save him. Aside from the droid - the miracle machine with wings - Six thought he was alone on the planet Catawba. Doomed to his own devices to live or die. This place was temperate enough for wildlife. He could hunt. Might have to soon. It was charted early in the Republic’s life, so surely it had homesteads and settlements. People out in the bush.

But for Six’s life, he couldn’t picture himself being rescued. That was lunacy.

If Catawba was lucky, the Junta would sweep the planet’s surface. There was a distinct possibility of boots on the ground, or a long-term deployment with quartering if Six managed to find help, a hope that didn’t seem likely at all. The locals certainly wouldn’t like troops stationed on their land, eating their food. The Junta had a vested interest in staying until they got what they wanted, and what they wanted was the droid. It could take months to find the little guy, wrecked or intact…

Not even the most generous homesteader could hold together under that kind of pressure.

Six was a wounded dog. A smart one, but he reckoned most would hand a dog over if the dog had bitten its owner and needed to be put down.

That was fine by him. 

Or at least, the hollow feeling passed well enough as ‘fine’ to let him wander into the primeval woods with a vague sense of direction.

He wondered how long that would last. 

Six missed medical droids. He missed knowing where to go, who to talk to, what was important. He missed sutures and anesthetic. If he knew what a house call and warm medicinal soup was, he would miss those too. He missed the smell of reprocessed air. He missed the calls on the intercom, signalling the schedules of people he would never meet.

The night air was cold. Unpredictably cold. The fog was swollen with the sounds of animals he’d never heard before. It smelled humid. Natural, in a way his mind was unable to process.

Mostly, though, Six missed… people.

In this natural environment, he missed the shapes and sounds of people doing things. Their details fascinated him as much as their individual little effects.

He reconsidered his previous ideas about living away from people. Even if they looked at him with suspicious eyes, it was some form of interaction. Some signal that he was alive, instead of a piece of inert refuse that needed disposal.

As painful as it would end up being, Six felt more comfortable seeking out a farmer and begging, instead of trying to solve his needs out in the wild, alone and in serious pain.

But the likelihood of finding anyone out here in the wilderness, much less a significant droid, were so slim that the only thing he could really do was walk.

Walk until he finally passed out.


	2. A Small House Call

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As a dark side disaster boy wanders the forest for help, a young witch makes her last rounds of the night...

Maddy Longreeds wasn’t certain how long she had been walking tonight. She was fairly sure it was too much for a witch.

Like she needed to take a sabbatical from the whole thing and put her feet up for a couple weeks. Tell walking to take a hike. She’d done enough already. Noon to sunset and well past it today alone, marching on tired soles through the bramble-bush hills and peat marshes with nary a speeder to offer her a lift.

What was one more doctor’s visit tonight, she remembered asking herself. You could do it. The Vangermars would appreciate it so much if you could come. Lace up before the moon comes out. 

Past Maddy was a jerk. She cared for people, though, and so did present Maddy. The obligation made her cranky, but no less eager to make the trip for someone who needed it. 

That said, all day was a pain. She filled her canteen twice. She ate lunch at a pace, chewing on sticks of jerky and nuts. She sang to herself until she ran out of songs, and made up a few about the night coming, until it came, and she had to sing about the night creatures to stay authentic. Because the owls liked the genuine article more than some happy-go-lucky artifice.

Master Esmer told her that early into witch training, and Maddy held onto it a long time. Catawba owls had a mystique about them that made vague, profound statements about their character somehow factual.

There were plenty more things to say about the animals that came out at night, but at this point, Maddy was just entertaining herself on another long stretch of ground.

What was it, nine house calls today? Busy. Maddy checked her patched-up bag. Four pounds of echo flower gone. The little pouch of pepper was out. Almost no salt-peter - just a pinch. Fusion lantern fuel was almost empty, and the little funnel can kept reminding her with a hollow thunk every step.

Clickity-clunk clickity-clunk, it went.

What else… Down to her last two rolls of gauze, a couple splints, a spool of adhesive tape, some yarn. Surprisingly, she was still full on suthe; not a lot of need for analgesics today. Full pocket of vaccine stims; but those were going to go quickly next season...

Maddy hopped a low-lying log on the trail. She heard a jingling in her front bag pocket, and remembered the most important thing in her collection.

“Oh yeah!” she exclaimed. She dug a hand into the pocket and produced a handful of gold coins.

Were they gold? Fully, truly gold? Tambi said they were, but Tambi said a lot of things. Maddy put them to the light on her blouse. Now that it was past sunset, the metal on them glittered differently than they did with natural lighting.

Indeed indeed, they were. No silver seam to be found. These were the genuine real deal; not a fake among them. 

The story behind them - the one Maddy planned to repeat whether or not these things turned out to be fake - was that they were from a time before credits. The grooves along the rim came from printing machines. Yep, big, impressive machines, built just to mint coins. Back in the day when currency wasn’t stored on a chip, coins were just as good for buying things as paper. They lasted longer, that’s for sure. A gold coin was worth its weight in metal. And - see that face there? That’s chancellor what’s-his-face. 

All of that was just set-dressing. A story to tell. Maddy memorized and embellished stories for a little idle conversation. The whole ‘witch with tall tales’ angle was a little tired in her neck of the woods, but it was her neck of the woods to ply. It was almost a professional obligation to be a good speaker.

But that alone wasn’t why she traded three power packs and a bottle of sap syrup to get a few coins. No, she traded for coins for practice. She dropped all but one of the coins back in the pocket. 

“Alriiiiight… one, two, three-”

Maddy put the coin in her right hand. Then she spun it, ran it over the knuckle, dropped it out, caught it with her left as it dropped. Then she repeated it, held it high to drop, and positioned to catch it out of the air with her right hand.

If anyone in her imaginary audience was watching carefully, they would’ve seen… nothing fall into her right hand. That’s because the coin never left. It slid down into the crook between her middle and forefinger, and if she timed it just right…

She could have it fall into her sleeve at the last moment. When she presented her hands to the befuddled victims of her magic trick, she could truthfully say the coin disappeared.

Maddy grinned brightly. She was getting good at this trick. And this coin - about the size of a walnut - fit nicely between her gloved fingers. It was a simple trick, she had to admit. But even the simple tricks fooled people. It bewildered the kids. Even confused a few adults on a good day.

One day, when Maddy could do the finger slip with reasonable enough proficiency, she’d move on to harder tricks. That day would be a little ways out. Her control wasn’t exact enough. Confidence was key, and if a witch wasn’t confident enough in a spell, then she wasn’t magical.

Magic was part of the act. Above all else, young Maddy of the long reeds wasn’t just a country wet nurse, a pinch veterinarian, or a delivery girl. She was a professional emissary of the arts. A translator of spinster spells and domestic sorcery. That intangible sense of mystical sans-affaires set her apart from all the other transients living in the woods. 

Coin tricks were one part of it, sure. So were incantations. She knew a few, and they were sometimes not nonsense. Animal language was another part - the silent stances to ward off creeper bears and get the banthas moving without hurting them. That was to say nothing of all the other tricks up her sleeve. Little lights up her sleeves, mimicry in her throat, card reading, palm reading…

She even had a couple plasma crackers in her bag for ostentatious displays of magical power. And the occasional quick getaway. Not everyone treated witches with the respect they deserved.

It was too late of an hour for bandits to be out anyway. She stopped, though, out of caution, as she heard a whine echo through the forest. A loud and long sound.

After a pause, Maddy carried on. Must’ve been the bog-wolves baying. Best not to stay out longer than needed. 

If her sympathetic memory was accurate - which, it typically was - the Vangermars lived in the hollow of the forest. Just past the gnarled shell of an Ocrebark tree, Old Infallible. Not a tree no more, but the stump still stood out. Maddy saw it coming in the moonlight and put the light on it, just to be sure. After that, it was a small slide down, a creek with some slate rock breaking up the shoals, and she’d see the fenceline to the property. She remembered the experience more than she marked the time, and thus, remembered the country as a tapestry of features and oddities rather than mile markers on a grid.

The country was just underdeveloped enough to make memories like Maddy’s more useful than a good map. Among all Catawba’s wilderness, situated in its most populated continent, there were still fewer people per mile than the average hectare of farm on a busier planet. This area in particular - the countryside ringing Auraria township - was split off into spokes of farmland and logging settlements that barely could see one another. Tens of miles split some families off from the main road inland. There was plenty of land to go around. 

Too much for Maddy’s liking. If they paid witches more, then she might be able to save enough scratch to get her own speeder bike. Oh, would that be a dream...

Mister and Missus Vangermar lived far off from Auraria proper, about as far as you can get before you hit the coast. The whole area was a proper lowland forest, but the homestead was real close to where the marsh met the sea. What did they raise there, shrimp? Tiny crustaceans? Anyway - they were pretty far from the witching house on the river of reeds. It made coming out a tough sell for Esmer or Maddy on a good day. Esmer more than her apprentice, though - she was getting on in years, and the exercise was more likely to leave her sore all weak than treat her arthritis any better than a good salve.

She found the creek shoals exactly where she figured they might be. She tested her boots on the slate, found them dry and non-slippery, and then hopped across instead of taking the bridge downstream.

It was just a bush after that before she saw the homestead, and the lantern hanging outside. Maddy felt a rush going to her feet. She practically glided to the porch.

Common practice shied away from building a home out on open terrain. The ground had what that old pilot Bancrof called ‘a high water table.’ He meant that most heavy building material - duracrete, plasteel, the imported stuff - sank after a month, which made a whole house lurch in one direction and flood the other. Not good. When the rains came, the roof’d leak, and then the shingles would fall loose and… 

People learned pretty quickly not to build like they were on some fancy schmancy place like Alderaan. Instead, they leaned on the root systems of the Ocrebark trees. They were big as a house on their own, easy to hollow out, durable to the elements, and the roots held on to soil, even if the rest of the tree was dead. Kept the whole thing from floating off in a storm. 

She hurried to the front stoop. Then stopped and collected herself before hitting the knocker.

“Miss Vangermar!” Maddy called out loud. “Are you still awake, Miss Vangermar?”

She waited in view of the speeder truck and the garage for a good few moments before someone answered. “Oh, goodness sake, somebody answered-”

Maddy cupped her hands over her bag. The overhead lights came on, and then the door opened wide. Rosy-cheeked, heavyset Miss Vangermar ushered her in without stopping for a welcome. “Come on now, come on. Don’t just stand out there.”

Maddy understood the hurry. She stepped into the treehouse, and the sounds of nighttime insects in the night melted into a different kind of vibrating noise.

_[... waking news from the northern front is grim. The siege of Bastion, going on three months as of now, seems to have come to a close. Sporadic fighting has been reported in the capital region, but anti-regime forces have officially pulled out of the system. Leadership in the 91st Mobile Infantry have declined requests to comment on the situation. Press corps have been detained by encroaching Junta forces. Detachments from the 74th and 88th are still engaged with in running battles in the Mygeeto and Muunilinst spheres, but it is unlikely that any progress will be made on…]_

Mr. Vangermar was listening to the radio again. The family was able to afford a comms relay on the property, not that it helped with their peace of mind. They bought it so the neighbors could come over and listen to the Coruscanti Opera, or the Corellian shows. Now, though, it was always the pirate news station.

Miss Vangermar gave her husband a look as they passed through the den. “Callen, turn that off!”

Her portly husband shushed back. “Shhhshsh, they’re talking about Bastion. Bastion, Rita, that’s in the stellar neighborhood.”

She planted hands on her hips, but doggedly, the man furrowed his moustache and crinkled his bulb of a nose. His face had turned cherry red - a feat for an already swarthy complexion. “It’s real. We’ll have to pick up and move. It’s the death of democracy, Rita.”

There were probably a dozen things worrying Callen Vangermar at any moment, but the state of the galaxy was what drove him up the wall. Even when his son was sick, his priorities were so far from the homestead, Maddy wondered how he could stay grounded. It was like he could float off at any moment and join… what, exactly? A resistance?

Maddy was far removed from the affairs of a galaxy. She suspected the Miss was far removed from it too, but she seemed even less willing to engage with it.

“Did you even check on Caleb like I asked you to?” she asked, worn to her wits end.

“His fever’s gone down,” he said, setting down his pad and small bottle of spirit. “Gave him more blanket to cover up.” 

That was one question Maddy didn’t have to ask. The note left at the town board mentioned something about a spike in his temperature and a cough that was rapidly getting worse. Fever, by the sounds of it. They also reported chills and weakness, which Maddy took to mean some kind of pneumonia.

She asked out loud: “Did you already run some tea? A bath?”

“I don’t have any tea,” Miss Vangermar sighed. “Nothing from ‘round here, anyway. No herbs in the pantry.”

The definition of ‘herb’ varied significantly enough among settlers that Maddy wasn’t sure if the round woman meant paprika or actual medicine. Either way, it wasn’t worth taking the risk. Maddy presented a couple ounces of crushed ibu flower to her. “Two cups boiling. How does Caleb like to take it?”

Miss Vangermar stammered. “H-he doesn’t- A lot of sugar. He eats anything with sugar. Will that hurt it at all?”

“Not in the slightest,” Maddy said coolly.

Rita Vangermar pointed over to the stairs with her chin and waddled towards the kitchen with tea bags in tow.

Mr. Vangermar called to her from the den. “Rita! Another unidentified object’s fallen in the woods! Not two clicks from here! The radio said it’s right in the neighborhood!”

So that’s what that whine was. A comet? Or maybe space junk?

**“YOU GET OFF YOUR BEHIND AND HELP ME WITH THIS TEA, CALLEN, I SWEAR TO ALL THAT’S GOOD AND GALACTIC-”**

Maddy slid out of the conversation and onto the stair landing before she could get trapped in a domestic dispute.

There were times when witches dropped the pretension of being an enigmatic font of mystery. This was one of them. Maddy took a low small breath. She had to be there now. Mentally in the present. Put the tiredness in her legs aside and project confidence.

The Vangermars ordered a witch to their house because they weren’t equipped to handle a sudden illness. They were first generation; colonists all the way from Ord Mantell, and they were more used to aquaculture than the unique circumstances of disease from the swamp. This was Maddy’s domain. She lived here all her life, she knew her stuff. She had better know her stuff, if anyone was going to ask for her help on the regular.

If Caleb was going to make it to the next morning.

She found his room past the second floor banister. The boy Caleb was buried deep in quilts on his bed. Models of T-Wings and Stormriders hung over his head, suspended by string from the ceiling. They were painted soft colors that were muted in the twilight by an aging fusion lantern. 

His face was young. Eleven, perhaps twelve years old. His cheeks had flushed pale. Maddy could see sweat running down his forehead. A low, haggard breath exhaled out of him, torn like a storm-ravaged sail. The Light knows how bad of a cough he had before the fever settled.

She stepped into his room. Caleb stirred, feeling the shadows move over him. “H-huh…? Dad?”

“It’s not your dad,” Maddy said. “I’m the local witch, here to take care of you. You remember me, Caleb? Matilda Longreeds?”

He’d seen her once before, when the Vangermars first landed. She would forgive him if she didn’t catch her name - younglings his age had a fair amount of things to worry about already. The questions were there more to help him wake up and engage, instead of wallowing in misery.

“Think I do,” he said. His voice was sopping wet with phlegm. “Hii…”

Maddy sat near to him on the bedding. The mattress creaked underneath. “Permission to take your temperature?” she asked.

Caleb nodded. Out of her bag, Maddy disgorged a thermoscanner. She put the back of her hand on his forehead, and predictably, he winced. The scanner was useful, allegedly, but it was really more of a formality. She trusted her intuition more than numbers, and her intuition was telling her this was definitely janken fever. A local disease that caused upper respiratory inflammation, and produced a lot of mucus. 

“... okay,” she said finally, putting a little loving steel in her voice. “I’m going to ask you to do something for me, okay?”

“My throat hurts,” Caleb moaned, barely able to speak.

“I have something for that,” Maddy replied. “It’s peppermint.”

“Mmmmh?”

Once upon a time, peppermint sat in the same stores as the rest of galactic candy. So said Esmer, and she knew things nobody else did. Now, it was hard to find anyone who knew what it was, or what it used to be used for.

Maddy produced a small disc of candy with swirls on it and unwrapped the package. “You’re sweating a lot, and you’ve got too much mucus in your lungs. That says to me that you’re running low on water.”

Caleb fidgeted weakly. 

“Water’s the foundation of life for anything and everything. It’s what we use to live. Water’s what the badness in your lungs wants to take away from you.”

He blinked blearly. He must have been barely awake. “How you mean…?”

She reached for her canteen. “When this badness is in your lungs,” Maddy said, “it wants to make your body try its hardest to get rid of it. That means running your skin really hot, and clogging your throat with that messy stuff made of water. That’s what mucus is made of, water. When you sweat, you’re losing it, and when you’re coughing and making mucus, you’re losing more of it.

“The badness only has to wait until you’re out, and then it can really hurt you.”

She motioned, he hesitated, and then let her put the peppermint on his tongue. Even shadowed, she saw the redness in the back of his throat.

“Mom’s coming with tea in a minute,” Maddy reassured. “Drink now, though. Just a little bit now.”

He tilted his head back. Hands shivering with fever reached out from under the coverlet and helped the canteen nozzle to his mouth. She was careful not to let it tip too far, or come too close to his mouth. Janken fever, coupled with pneumonia, spread through water. She made a reminder to tell the parents, just in case.

Caleb sipped and sipped with audible grunts of suffering. The burning in the back of his throat was combining with the fever into a sensory sludge. Maddy knew as much; she experienced it before. Not quite his age, but still at a formative part of her life. She knew to fear the fever.

Treat it soon, and you can crawl out of bed the next morning. Treat it late, and you never get back up.

Children like Caleb had it worse because the fever was partly autoimmune. It convinced the body to hurt itself, in a bit to get rid of the sickness, but the sickness was already so used to living in liquid spaces, feeding on the heat of methane bubbles and the guts of banthastock, that a spike in the body’s temperature often didn’t stop it. More often than not, a bad case was certain death without treatment.

Lucky for him, he did have treatment coming. Miss Vangermar came up the stairs after a time with a kettle and teacup on a tray. Maddy moved her bag to let her set it down. “Now - do you drink tea?”

“No,” said Caleb. “I drink-”

And then he coughed. Rita recoiled in horror as he reached deep into himself and hacked and choked with every rasping cough. Maddy held back. He doubled over, forced out of the quilts by his abdomen clenching up, and coughed until he sounded like he had torn open his throat. He hadn’t, but phlegm was already dribbling out of his mouth.

He managed to keep the peppermint in his mouth, though. That was a good sign.

“... you’re going to have to be a big boy, Caleb,” Maddy said softly. “This is going to help your throat to stop hurting.”

“I-is it bad?” Caleb asked with breaths as thin as a razor.

“It’s bitter,” Maddy fibbed. Better to tell a half truth than admit how much ibu tea needed sugar to be tolerable. “But you can handle it.”

He seemed reluctant to agree. Then again, if anything would make this bad night go a little faster, he was all ears.

Maddy presented the teacup in her gloves, blowing on the wafting steam. Gingerly, he let it tip, and shuddered at the taste and heat as it entered his mouth. “H-hot…!”

“Easy…” Maddy said. “Easy.”

Tending to a child who was ill was a lot like nursing a sick animal, in Maddy’s experience. Both acted on a sort of autopilot. With their faculties inflamed, and their throats unable to vocalize their needs, it was often better to divine the cause and symptoms and act in their best interest, than try and fail to understand what was wanted. Neither really could understand what was happening to them except for the spikes in pain and misery.

It was one facet of what called to Maddy in this life. The tricks were one thing. The status was vaunted, but unnecessary. Pretentious to grandeur were fine, but gaudy and secondary to the point. That point was:

Understanding cured illness. Patience soothed pain. And knowledge made all things whole.

Maddy’s identity was wrapped up in this mantra. All eighteen years of her life were devoted to putting it into practice. She struggled with it. She failed at it. But she succeeded more often than she failed, and over the years, she became proficient in the art of aid.

Esmer trained her this way, and the old woman trained her well. There was no life on this planet who would ever take care of you except the family who took you in, she said, and it’s your job to provide where even that fails.

Rita Vangermar was no less of a mother for not knowing how to treat a fever like this. If anything, she was more of one for worrying so deeply, and audibly resisting the urge to weep. Until a handful of minutes ago, she was deep in the mire of panic and delirium. Who could blame anyone for feeling that way?

The minutes whiled away. Caleb coughed less and less, as he drank more and more bitter ibu tea and swallowed it down. The congestion in his throat ebbed, as the disc-shaped lump in his cheek shrank between suckles. 

She checked his forehead at the chime of twelve from the family’s grandfather clock. It looked like he was finally falling asleep. 

Reluctantly, Maddy nudged a half-conked out Miss Vangermar. “Do you have a guest room?”

“Mmmh?” the plump woman said, rubbing her eyes.

“I’d rather stay with him till he wakes up in the morning. Do you have a guest room I can stay in for the time being? I can sleep in here, really.”

Miss Vangermar regarded Maddy. All five feet nothing of her, in her wide-brimmed hat, cloak and blouse. She had that look like she was looking at someone who could have been her own child in another life. She smiled. “I have an extra coverlet,” she said. “And a couple pillows. I can set you up in here.”

“Really now?” Maddy said. She adjusted her bifocals to hide a little blush coming in. “That’s welcome, though. Thanks, Miss Vangermar.”

“S’no problem,” she clucked back, trying for a little more cheerful of a tone. “Rita’s fine, though. You can call me that. Do you need some sort of payment in advance? I never worked with a witch before.”

“The usual for a country doctor,” Maddy said. Then she added: “Around five hundred for a spot call, and a ride back to town.”

For the Vangermars, that many credits was barely a drop in the bucket. They had the money for model starfighters and quilts and a garage full of machinery. Maddy could have pressed for more, but considering the heartache already, and the night waiting for her, it seemed immoral to charge.

Rita clapped her on the shoulder. “I’ll fix you up with food, howsabout, eh? We make good stew here.” 

Maddy winced. Big woman, big patting. “Sure. Haha…”

Turning down food was never in a witch’s self interest. Since, well, they ate what they could afford, and what they could afford was not much. Then again, if all they ate at this homestead was sea critters with lots of little legs, Maddy wasn’t sure how much of that stew could be capable of keeping down…

She was about to say something to that effect, when a crashing sound came from outside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A 4k word doozy. This one is a tad bit slow, but worldbuilding is a small treat for me. As of this chapter, our two mains have entered the stage! The main romantic element. Now all we have to do is put them together and kiss-


	3. The Second Pod

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Six fights off the urge to pass out, and runs into the second escape pod on Catawba.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Took a while to really get this chapter to land. Most of it was writer's block, but I managed to power through it with a little time dedicated to scenario planning.

> My mind is measured apace,  
> Watching stars hanging in place.  
> Fixed overhead, they crawl,  
> As I slowly sink and fall.
> 
> I discovered my friend meter again,  
> In an effort deemed spoiled and vain.  
> Of all the notions to needle myself raw,  
> It’d be poetry in the sarlacc’s maw.

Six fought to stay awake. The blood on his arm had coagulated, and the same had happened to the pain. It had turned into a numb, sticky scab on his nervous system. He knew he was still thinking and moving because he could feel his heart beating slowly through his wound. It was like a river flooding its banks. Sending water washing up the shore until the white foam inundated the dirt and disappeared.

Fuck, it hurt.

He fell against the side of a steep embankment, narrowly missing the wound. Spasms reached into his shoulder.

Dying might have been preferable to this. He could feel his strength ebbing. The scabby pain was taking it. He could barely keep standing. Sooner or later, Six would lose the focus to do even that, and if that happened, then he would rapidly fall unconscious.

No. No, he could keep moving if he caught his breath. Make the energy flow into him. Sustain himself, just a little longer.

Find shelter, or find the droid. Whatever happened first, that was his goal, he decided. No matter what. His body would keep moving until one or the other happened.

Six reached deep within himself. The problem now wasn’t panic. Six restrained panic an hour ago - an hour or so. He didn’t know for certain. The panic of being lost, severed and separated from his past had muffled to a thrumming noise in the back of his head, and then to nothing. It was that nothing now that needed to be stirred up again. For the Force to work, for his body to listen to him at all, he needed powerful emotions at the ready, under tight reins.

He felt for his anger. The righteous fury of being right. It slipped out of his grasp at first, but with a deeper breath, he took it and held the idea firm.

Breathe. Expand the lungs, and fill the veins with fire.

Breathing techniques were common among the Galaxy’s spiritual disciplines and martial arts precisely because they activated the spirit. Oxygen carried life to the cells. It invigorated them. It commanded their attention and sent energy rippling through the flesh. But more than that, it bottled up purpose and sent it to the extremities that needed it the most.

Purpose is what drove everything. Purpose gave life to the body politic. It made the sapient more than the sum of their flesh. It gave power to the powerless. It gifted passion.

Passion was the truth. Peace… stillness, that was a deception. A still heart was an empty vessel. Vessels without life were dead.

Breathe.

Lady Nerva told him so many lies, but the lesson of stillness was foundational. He felt it in every acolyte, across the spectrum of the dark side. Emotions were blood. Essential fluids that carried action to reaction. All action that ever happened in the universe was the result of one force acting upon another. For human beings, that was the application of willpower into the vast, mysterious energy field of the Force.

Reaching out and grabbing hold of your own power was the first step to defining your purpose. Leash it, subdue it, but never let it deafen and die.

What did Six have? Betrayal. His heart was inundated with betrayal. He clung to it - the central node at the core of all his pain. Nerva lied to him. She destroyed him on a whim, like the five apprentices before him. They failed her for being too weak, but he failed her for - what? Speaking the truth to power?

He hated her. He despised her. A knot coiled in his throat, until it was almost too hard to swallow. If it was the last thing he’d do, Six would save that droid. He owed it a life, as much as Nerva deserved to be destroyed. But he would only make it back to the sanctum chamber of the Warden if he managed to…

Breathe.

Feeling came back to Six slowly. His legs ached, but he could sense the strength coming back to it. His arm stung, which was a sign that it was still functional. The pump of his heart matched the throb in his head, and he was certain that he could keep going.

Six was also certain he smelled something. Ashes, burnt metal, charred wood and... ash?

He shoved off the tree. His heart ached. It didn’t smell like droid slag, but then again, how could he tell? It took him several minutes to orient again, trying to center the smell in his mind and find the direction it was coming from. This wasn’t an easy task by any stretch. The forest’s sloping valleys and gullies, slow rises and abrupt ravines played tricks on Six’s mind. It was alien terrain, a natural maze.

Then he caught it. And then, he found smoke.

A column of black exhaust spit darkness into the air. Six lumbered over the ridgeline, and came across a crater in the scarred earth.

The scene was a natural carnage. Six had little grounding for what he was looking at. He knew the escape pod, the metal casing cracked and melted by re-entry, but everything else was a horror he could barely find a reference. Trees had snapped like power lines. Those that weren’t in the path of the pod warped from the heat, until the bark cracked and the pulp bled. The foliage had burned up, turned to ash that smelled like blaster scoring. Or maybe that was what leaves smelled like. Embers smouldered in the dirt. Little fires caught on dry branches. A durasteel beam was lodged in the ground at an off-kilter angle, such that it looked like a perverted obelisk to a dark god.

There was a dying creature in the brush, writhing. He could see its antlers. Six’s anxiety swelled until he was choking on his heartbeat.

The Dark Side commanded through sacrifice and pain. It trafficked in misery. At low intensities, interminable and powerless, it was naught but aimless cruelty. Six staggered over to the animal. It flinched, kicking on instinct. Animal fear told it that it should run, but its legs were twisted the wrong way and it was lying on its side, fur scarred and moist, partially impaled. It was incapable of running if it tried.

He put his boot on the gore in its neck and pressed until it stopped moving. Six exhaled, falling against the hull of the pod.

This was not a new feeling. Six felt it before the droid. But the droid made those feelings sharp, and made him a frail being. He had to find it. He simply had to.

His eyes scanned the wreckage. There wasn’t much to salvage. The pod came in at a steeper angle than his, and caused more damage to the soil. Near as his flustered, weary mind told, it meant a delay between entry. Possibly, a few minutes, or even half an hour, but at that point, it was guesswork. The launcher fired on poor coordinates, and the jumpjets didn’t account for stability or hazards on the ground. The pilot was in a hurry. Six could empathize with the sentiment.

His calculations, hazy as they were, suggested he’d been followed. The reason was straightforward - either to kill him, steal the droid back, or some combination or both.

There was much less to see inside. The porthole was smashed. The hinge mechanisms had been crushed, and discharged sparks at regular intervals. Circuitry poured out of the walls. The navicomputer terminal was dark, inundated with hairline cracks. Probably wouldn’t turn on again. Somehow, the pilot inside had torn open a hole through the bulkhead. They peeled it from the side and crawled through the opening, then staggered out of the wreck and into the forest…

Six despaired quietly. It was too dark to track. Manhandling live wire would kill him. He wondered what he could do...

That was when Six saw a shape in the brush. A small one, shaped like a bulb, rested on a gnarled root. It didn’t move. He wobbled to the shape and knelt next to it. He picked it up in his good hand and cradled a full helmet. Junta Navy spec, ensign class. A hardened gasmask with coal-colored eyes, and a gash down the cheek.

“Hey! HEY-“

Six folded against the pod. He searched for the voice – it was downfield, several dozen yards away.

“This is the only warning you’ll get! Outside! All occupants outside!”

Six ducked his head reflexively. No shots came his way. He paused, and dropped to prone, wincing as he hit the ground. Still nothing.

The voice had a vague accent to it. Core world. It was a husky soprano that turned hoarse in yells, rasping. Despite that, it was youthful.

“Out of the house one at the time, hands up where I can see them.”

A house? Property? People? She was yelling at people. There was civilization on this rock after all.

Six crawled towards the commotion. His torn arm tensed. Blood weeped out of the wound. Nothing much he could do about it now except to focus on his desperation, and avoid the briars in the bushline. There was a chance the dressings could tear; from there, his path diverged, and unlike many things in his life, Six had a choice. Did he want a violent death days from now, and a quiet one in a fugue state, riddled with infection?

The scene opened up to him like curtains rising on a play. A cleared section of land, several hectares long, with a garage, a stream, a two-story building built into the carcass of a tree, and people arranged like dolls under porch lights. There were three, coming out by the side of the house. The situation was foggy with apprehension and confusion. He didn’t want to risk getting in the way, not now...

“Is that everyone?” the trooper said. After a silence, she repeated more loudly: “Is that everyone in the house?”

The taller of the two civilians - a plump, red-headed woman in an apron and blouse - recoiled. She kept her hands up. “I got a small one upstairs, he can’t come down. Can’t- can’t come down, I’m sorry.”

She stammered genuinely. Six couldn’t begin to guess what it felt like to be in her position, except that it was awful. He wished he couldn’t hear them talking.

The girl to her left, dressed in a wide-brimmed hat stitched together out of many pieces of hat, paged for the trooper’s attention. She unfolded her gloved hands placatingly. “He’s sick with Janken fever. It’s a kind of pneumonia. I should know - I’m his doctor tonight. He’s bedridden.”

“How old?

“What?” the woman asked. She shifted uncomfortably.

“How old is the youngling? Can he walk?”

“By the light, no, he’s sick. H-he can’t...”

That struck Six as surprising to hear. Provincials still believed in the light. That, or it was so deeply ingrained that the colonists invoked it as second nature.

The play moved on. The woman burbled, unable to really vocalize her fear of moving the kid without a passionate cry for help. The trooper leveled her rifle, and the woman’s voice caught in her throat.

“Please, ma’am,” the girl interjected. “We’re not sure what you want. Please, we’re cooperating. We’re cooperating. If you could please put your gun down, we can talk...”

“The child needs to come out so I can see him,” said the trooper. Through the yellow light, Six saw green pigment and black tattoos. A Mirialan, one of the near-human species in the galaxy conscripted into the Junta’s armed forces. Short hair, nearly buzzed. He couldn’t make her features out distinctly, except that they were hard like granite.

The holdup wasn’t an act, he remembered – it was standard procedure for quartering and commandeering. She was too far out to reach with his feelings as frayed as they were, but Six could imagine the trooper was just as scared as her captives. She was just better at hiding that she was afraid.

There was a lull in the conversation as its participants waited for the next signal, good or bad. Six caught the scar on the Mirialan woman’s face, tracing the mark on the helmet from the jaw up into her eye.

“I need your speeder,” she finally said. “I’m an aide for the 304th Star Battalion, stationed in orbit. This is a requisition order for an investigation in the local area. I can’t leave until I’m sure all weapons and persons are accounted for. I’m sorry already. Comply, and we can forget we saw each other.”

The girl in the hat pressed on. “We can do what you ask, but I can’t force him to walk.”

“Carry him, then,” the trooper said.

“I can move him-“ the woman croaked. She sensed the chance to flee from the conversation, wavering for the front door.

The rifle jerked up. Six heard the cock of the plasma chamber from half a mile away and froze. The woman let out an anguished moan and fell against the porch. No shots - both sides were grateful.

“We’re just farmers out here, for gosh’s sake, I harvest shellfish!”

“Please!” the girl implored. Her hands fanned out in front of what Six assumed was a confidant. Mother, maybe. “One of us can go up and get him.”

“Can’t,” the trooper answered back, clipped. “Precautions. I can’t leave either of you alone. The two of you, together – on your feet.”

The girl shook her head adamantly. Her curls flew from shoulder to shoulder. “Bad idea, ma’am.”

“Are you threatening me?” She asked it as a matter of course, but this was usually the moment a civilian wised up and stopped trying to negotiate.

“It’s a bad idea to go in there,” said the girl, trying to stay patient. “We have no reason to hurt you. If we have to show you Caleb, then let us go in and get him.”

Six felt the hairs on the back of his neck come up. He had a bad feeling...

The trooper was having none of it. Her posture straightened. She opened her mouth to force the issue, but there was a loud click from inside the house.

“I knew it!” crowed an angry brogue of a voice.

The trooper jumped. She stepped back, aiming at the hip. The mood flipped into an open panic. The cycling lock on the porch door came loose, and a portly farmer with glasses and a longarm in his grip stormed out onto the yard. He collapsed in around his wife, leveling the barrel of his slugthrower at the Mirialan’s midsection.

“Mr. Vangermar-“ the girl bleated in shock.

“You’re not allowed on this patch’a stardust,” he bellowed. “Get out! Get off my property.”

“Put the weapon down, sir,” the trooper warned. She was rapidly losing control.

“You’re not taking my liberty here, y’brainwashed little monster! Get out! I’m not afraid.”

He was wrong. Everyone was. Six was swimming in their fear. Things had escalated so fast he didn’t know what to do.

The wife cried “Callen please-“

“It’s alright,” he called back, barely able to hear her over his own fury. “I’m throwing her out or I’m blasting a hole in her breast plate.”

“Sir-“ but the trooper was drowned out.

“I give you to the count of three before you get off my farm and limp back to the Thule pits! One-“

“MR. VANGERMAR-“ the girl squealed.

“TWO-“

“I will shoot-“

Six was faster than he remembered. He had started running seconds before he knew he was running, bolting out of the brush and swinging himself over the fence line. The pain had retreated into the back of his head, and what was left pressed forward.

“What in the hell-“

Six knew what was happening. He was acting on instinct.

He ran into the way of the trooper and carried her out of the way before the crack of a gun shot.

The bystanders screamed. Six’s arm blazed; he tasted blood and saline. He hadn’t been shot, bless – there was a hole in the wall where a dead young man should have been, 3 inches wide and peeled all the way through into the house. He’d just hit her, and slammed his bad arm into her stomach, but apart from that, they were alive. He stopped a needless death.

The trooper shoved at him. He fought to keep the muzzle leveled at the ground, and barely avoided a pair of rounds discharged into the dirt.

The struggle was long, clumsy and stupid. She was unfocused; he was She made half-strangled noises trying to get Six off of her, so somehow, his dark strength was holding together. He was dimly aware of the farmer scrabbling to load a new cartridge into the breech. Something had to be said, or the second shot was going into his head.

“S-stop.”

“The blasted devil you think you’re doing?!” the trooper squawked helplessly.

The farmer shook his head. “Out the way, out the way-“

He was wrangled before he made good on a threat. The girl in the wide-brimmed hat snatched at his rifle and dragged it out of his hands. “ENOUGH! Down! Mr. Vangermar down, You’ll get someone killed!“

It worked. Her placating had the man flustered. Six looked back and appraised the trooper getting ready to club him in the head. “Stupid, stupid. I’m trying to save you.”

She spit. He caught a seditious look in her eye. The look said ‘traitor bastard,’ and he quickly realized how much she was in the loop.

This couldn’t last any longer. Six used the last weapon he was willing to use – his forehead.

She managed to gurgle out. “You’re the mark-” but then he jerked, threw his head forward, and put her out with a decisive crack. She slumped, eyes lolling up.

The whiplash jack-knifed his balance. He staggered away, panting. It was suddenly difficult to stand. Nascently, troublingly difficult. He felt thoughts bubbling out of the cut in his brow. His head was emptying out. Thoughts were leaking, like carbonation, leaving him with his body and a presence of mind rapidly escaping. The strings to his knees and elbows, hands and feet were dangling and the only thing Six could influence was how fast he might fall over.

He hung in the air. At the same time clear-headed and completely out of steam. The engine was dry. His hate burned out. The adrenaline was almost gone.

The forest had... animal sounds at night. Six heard them clearly for the first time. Little frogs and insects, and mammals and skinks and nocturnal birds.

He’d heard them called owls, once upon a time. Six had never seen one before.

The soil slipped out from underneath him. The stage was giving way, now that he had broken the fourth wall and stopped the show. All’s well. The last thing he saw before the world came up to meet him was the girl with the wide-brimmed hat, sprinting to his side.

**Author's Note:**

>  **AN:** The following is my first real foray in a serialized story. Long a writer of one shots and commissions, never something long-form. Be patient with it. It'll be real slow. It's a pocket universe of sorts in Star Wars; a playground, really. Do not expect big names, just Big Themes. If this gets traction and people want to see more, I'll post more!
> 
> Thank you much for reading! <3


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